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With the mourning, cleanup and investigation underway at West Fertilizer, attention turns to why this disaster happened and what could have been done to prevent it.

West Fertilizer is owned by Donald Adair, a fixture in the West, Tx. community who also owns Adair Grain and Adair Farms, which comprises crop production and cattle feed lots. He is believed to be 83 years old. According to Dun & Bradstreet, Adair founded the company in 1958. It has 8 employees.

The president of West Fertilizer is Ted Uptmore, whose family is prominent in West and operates a livestock auction business near the plant called West Auctions. A woman who answered the phone at the auction business this morning said they were inundated with media, but confirmed that both Mr. Uptmore and Mr. Adair survived the blast and were dealing with the situation.

Calls placed to Adair Farms were not immediately returned. No one picked up the phone at the West Church of Christ, where Mr. Adair appears to be actively involved.

Yet Adair Grain in June 2006 received complaints from local residents about odors from the plant. According to the official complaint filed with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, there was an "ammonia smell very bad last night from Fertilizer Plant, lingered until after they went to bed."

The TCEQ investigated the plant and noted that the plant had two 12,000-gallon tanks of highly explosive anhydrous ammonia within 3,000 feet of two schools. The TCEQ required Adair to build a wall between the tanks and a road to prevent vehicles from running into them. This wall was built and the company agreed to maintain safety precautions around the tanks.

That same year the EPA fined Adair $2,300 for failure to implement a risk management plan. According to the EPA's registry, there have been no notices of violation, or enforcement actions against Adair Grain in the past five years. More here from the Dallas Morning News.

According to Dun & Bradstreet, one of Adair's other corporate entities is Texas Grain Storage. In 2007 a plaintiff with that same name was involved in a class-action suit against over its monopoly position in the pesticide market with Roundup. The claims were later dismissed.

In a kind of sick coincidence the West explosion comes exactly 66 years after America's worst ever industrial disaster. On April 16, 1947 a fire onboard a freighter at the Texas City port ignited a cargo of ammonium nitrate and caused an explosion so enormous that the ship's anchor weighing 1.5 tons was thrown 2 miles away. Nearly 600 were killed in the blast.